Modeling on the Aspects of Thermal Response of Bay of Bengal to Tropical Cyclone TC05B 1999 using Princeton Ocean Model (POM): Preliminary Results

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TC’s), while moving over the ocean bring about significant changes in ocean thermal structure and other ocean environment. These oceanic thermal responses provide vital information for understanding the air-sea interaction processes. This study used Princeton Ocean Model (POM) to investigate the changes in the oceanic thermal characteristics of Bay of Bengal (BOB) associated with TC05B (Orissa super cyclone) 1999. Model was forced with the wind and heat plus salinity fluxes as surface forcing in different experiments. In order to provide reasonable and realistic cyclonic winds to the model as forcing, the tropical cyclone wind model (TCWM) was developed to generate the synthetic cyclonic winds and superimposed with the analyzed blended QSCAT/NCEP wind field. Results show significant drop in sea surface temperature (SST) beneath the storm centre and to the right of the track confirming the earlier findings and are in qualitative agreement with the available Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) satellite SST imageries. Subsurface thermal structures also reflect significant impact of cyclonic vortex over BOB.